The main message of Matteo Renzi’s referendum campaign was a simple slogan ‘it only takes a yes to change Italy’. Repeatedly in television debates the Italian prime minister reduced the complexities of the constitutional changes proposed to a simple soundbite: a yes vote would bring change, while a no vote would leave Italy with its […]
While WB Yeats poem The Second Coming was written in 1919, after the horror of the First World War, and amidst the chaos of the developing Irish war of Independence, it remains fearfully appropriate to modern times. The spirit of democracy demands that we congratulate the winner of an election, and accept the will of […]
Situated adjacent to the Crimean Parliament building in Simferopol, the newly rebuilt Cathedral of Saint Alexander Nevsky is a magnificent structure. Gilded onion-domes, Greco-Roman columns and pediments – it looks every bit as classy as a well financed Orthodox cathedral should be. On entering, a question occurs to me, however – why are the icons […]
English identity sits at the centre of the debate on British membership of the EU, but that identity, moulded by television and the tabloid media has become a surrogate Englishness dominated by pint supping, cricket watching, and endless mugs of tea; an identity shorn of its uncomfortable, radical roots. What, though might the English tradition […]
